Dialectics and metaphysics.
Dialectics is a theory of the most general connections of the
universe and its cognition and also the method of thinking
based on this theory. Anyone who wants to find a rational
orientation in the world and change the world must have a
knowledge of the dialectics of life and thought. Dialectical
thinking has its roots far back in the past. The most striking
example was Heraclitus, who saw the world as being in constant
flux, intrinsically contradictory, an eternally living fire
blazing up and dying down according to certain laws. The ideas
of dialectics run right through the history of the development
of human thought. They were profoundly expressed in such great
thinkers as Kant and Hegel. In Hegel, dialectics embraces the
whole sphere of reality and the life of the mind. Dialectical
thought reached its highest peak in the philosophy of Marxism,
in which materialist dialectics is expressed in a system of
philosophical principles, categories and laws.

Dialectics arose and develops historically in a struggle
against the metaphysical method, which is characteristically
one-sided and abstract and inclined to absolutise certain
elements within the whole. Metaphysical views have taken
various historical forms. While Heraclitus stressed one aspect
of existence—the changeability of things, which the
Sophists extended to complete relativism, the Eleatic
philosophers in their criticism of the Heraclitean principle
of flux, concentrated on another aspect, on the stability of
existence and went to another extreme in supposing that
everything was changeless. Thus, some philosophers dissolved
the world in a fiery flux while others crystallised it into
immovable rock.

In modern times metaphysics has taken the form of an
absolutising of the analysis and classification techniques in
the cognition of nature. Because they are constantly repeated
in scientific research, the techniques of analysis,
experimental
isolation and classification have gradually imparted to
scientific thinking certain general ideas suggesting that in
nature's "workshop" objects exist in isolation, as it
were, apart from one another. As philosophy and the
specialised sciences have developed the focus of the struggle
between dialectics and metaphysics has shifted from attempts
to explain the connection of things to interpretation of the
principle of development. Here metaphysical thought emerged at
first in the form of simple evolutionism, and then in various
concepts of "creative evolution". While the former
hypertrophies quantitative and gradual changes, ignoring
qualitative transitions and breaks in gradualness, the latter
absolutise the qualitative, essential changes without
perceiving the gradual quantitative "preparatory"
processes leading up to them. So metaphysical thought is
inclined to "jump" to extremes, to exaggerate some aspect
of the object: its stability, recurrence, relative
independence, and so on. In cognition this leads to idealism
or dogmatism and, in practice, to the justification of
stagnation and reaction. The only antidote to metaphysics and
dogmatism, which is metaphysics in another form, is
dialectics, which will not tolerate stagnation and sets no
limits to cognition and its scope. Dissatisfaction with what
has been achieved is the element of dialectics, and
revolutionary activity is its essence.

Categories.
In philosophy, categories are extremely general, fundamental
concepts reflecting the most essential, law-governed
connections and relationships of reality. Categories are the
forms and stable organising principles of the thought process
and, as such, they reproduce the properties and relations of
existence in global and most concentrated form. Categories are
the result of generalisation, of the intellectual synthesis of
the achievements of science and socio-historical practice and
are, therefore, the key points of cognition, the moments when
thought grasps the essence of things. This is the
starting-point for the analysis of the diversity (individual
and particular, part and whole, form and content, etc.).

The categories are universal and lasting because they reflect
what is most stable in the universe. Moreover, in the process
of history the content, role and status of the categories
change and new categories (system, structure, for example)
arise.

In the present age the rapid and overall development of
scientific knowledge goes hand in hand with a process of
identification of fundamental concepts which acquire the
significance of categories inasmuch as they perform in
relation to specific fields of knowledge a function comparable
to that of philosophical categories, for example, information,
self-regulation, symmetry, and so on, and also constitute the
subject-matter of a specific science, that is to say, they are
universal and non-variable in relation to a great number of
special concepts of such a science (for example, the
categories of organism or species in biology, the categories
of image, action, motive in psychology, the categories of
element in chemistry, of particles and fields in physics, and
of commodities and value in political economy). This prompts
us to investigate the system of scientific categories as
something with its own specifics, something that does not
coincide with the system of philosophical categories, although
it is closely connected with that system. By tracing the
system of scientific categories we can uncover the logic of
development of any given science, the law-governed
transformation of its conceptual build-up. The categories of
philosophy, which constantly accumulate the results of the
development of the specialised sciences, help us to identify
and synthesise the elements of world-view and methodology in
scientific thought.

The categories bear a certain relation to one another and
constitute a system. They are so interconnected that each can
only be understood as an element of the whole. The initial
categories for the whole system are those of matter and
consciousness. They provide the trunk from which all the various
branches of the other categories stem.